About the Electronic Literature Organization:
Communitarian Impulse Actually Leads to Something
While the hypertext writers and theorists were mixing with the technologists at the conference like oil and water, the Unknown were more like vinegar, mixing (or not) equally well with the businesspeople (who were not like us) as we did with the tenured hypertext figures (who were also not like us). I found all of the work shown at the conference fascinating, and the various problems that were discussed during the conference sounded more like opportunities from my untutored perspective. At lunch on the final day of the conference, I was sitting with Jeff Ballowe and Bob Coover. Jeff asked if I had any ideas on how people in the tech industry might help electronic authors to produce more innovative work and to reach a wider audience. I pointed out that there was a nonprofit infrastructure for other art forms, and for print literature, without which, for instance, poetry would have an even more marginal position in our culture. Jeff, who had worked with the nonprofit Illinois Arts Alliance in a previous life, agreed to help me put together a nonprofit organization to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing and reading of electronic literature provided I was willing to devote the time necessary to launch such an endeavor.

I went home and cashed in most of the few stock options I’d been awarded through my work with About.com, giving me a cushion to operate from for a few months. Jeff, Bob and I worked through several drafts of the proposal before gathering an impressive board of directors, which included some of the more innovative electronic writers, such as Stuart Moulthrop and Marjorie Luesebrink, publishing executives, such as Mark and Peter Bernstein, and importantly, literary nonprofit leaders including Bill Wadsworth who was at the time the executive director of the Academy of American Poets and Celia O’Donnell, who was at the time the executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. Soon thereafter we gathered an Internet Industry Advisory Board, who generously provided us with the seed money necessary to launch the organization, and a Literary Advisory Board, including luminaries from the worlds of both print and electronic literature, who have loaned the organization both their prestige and a great deal of impassioned work in the years since. By September of 1999, we had incorporated The Electronic Literature Organization as an Illinois not-for-profit corporation and at the turn of the Millennium we launched the website <http://www.eliterature.org>, which has served as an information resource and community hub for electronic literature ever since.

The mission of the ELO is to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of electronic literature. I tend to look at any of our programs in those terms: asking whether a given project or event will either promote or facilitate. During the first couple of years of the organization’s life, much of our energy went to promoting both the work of electronic literature and the work of the organization. Our first events were focused on fundraising and on community building. During our first year, we held events in Chicago, New York and Seattle. While our attempt to shake some change from the pockets of the Microsoft millionaires in Redmond failed miserably, and even received a negative review in the American Book Review, our work in New York was far more successful, resulting in both a special issue of Poets and Writers devoted to new work in electronic literature, and in the initiation of a relationship with the Ford Foundation without which the ELO would not have survived the recent economic downturn. Late in 2000, we also launched the Electronic Literature Directory, the most comprehensive directory of work in the field, with annotated links to more than 800 works of electronic literature. The initial funding for this work came from technology companies and individuals. ZDNet and NBCi each made substantial contributions, which allowed us to employ me as executive director of the organization, and a network of independent contractors who built and have continued to develop the substantial tech infrastructure of the organization’s websites.

A gift from ZDNet also made the 2001 Electronic Literature Awards possible. In the most substantial awards program in the field of electronic literature to date, our judges selected short-lists of six works of electronic literature in two categories, poetry and fiction, and awarded $10,000 prizes to the two winners, Londoner John Cayley for his morphing text HyperCard poetry “Windsound” and Canadian Caitlin Fisher for her web-based hypertext fiction, “These Waves of Girls.”

Additionally in 2001, we intensified our Web activity and developed relationships with other organizations, such as the Boston Cyberarts Festival, NYU, the New School, Book Tech West, the Illinois Arts Council, the Illinois Humanities Council and the Chicago Humanities Festival, which enabled us to organize readings and events in other parts of the country. Unfortunately, early in 2001, the economic decline that began in 2000 took its toll on the ELO. None of the individuals or technology companies who had supported the organization early on were thinking about philanthropy as they watched their own fortunes and those of their companies dwindle down to almost nothing.

Go West, Young Literary Nonprofit Organization
Thankfully, two parties stepped in to fill the void. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English and Design/Media Arts at UCLA and a member of the ELO Literary Advisory Board, hearing mere rumor that the ELO was considering moving from our modest offices in Chicago to a university home, very quickly mobilized and successfully lobbied UCLA to put together a generous offer, providing the organization with space, a graduate assistant, a small budget for office expenses and technological support for next five years. The ELO board gratefully accepted UCLA’s offer in October of last year. We are now nicely nested within a major research institution, and can operate with a degree of security for at least the next five years. With the organization’s move to LA, I stepped down as executive director but served as a consultant during the transition and helped to organize our first Symposium on the State of the Arts of electronic literature, held in April 2002 at UCLA, and I recently joined the ELO’s board of directors.

The ELO’s other angel came in the form of John Santos at the Ford Foundation’s Media Arts and Culture program. The Ford Foundation provided us with a $100,000 grant, which supported the symposium and other recent activities of the organization. Santos has also helped us to lobby for the support of other foundations, including the Rockefeller Foundation, which is now supporting our directory project.

The recent symposium <http://www.eliterature.org/state/> was a great success: we were able to gather many of the leading writers, publishers, theorists and activists in the field for three days of concentrated discussions about specific issues, such as the problem of archiving digital culture, or the challenge of starting new graduate programs in electronic literature, during the day, and readings at night. The symposium was a stakeholders conference: we wanted to gather people who are not only passionate about the new forms but who are also actively working to make room for electronic literature in institutions ranging from small independent publishing houses to new university programs.

Looking forward to the next few years: I think that the following can be expected from the Electronic Literature Organization: